Ouch.
Feeling’s mutual, I send.
So after school I was kind of losing it a little bit in my room and when my mom got home she heard me.
She came in and asked me what was wrong and I kind of told her everything.
Everything?
Everything.
My face heats up. Tears sting the corners of my eyes. I never wanted anyone to know all of what happened between us—especially not Mrs. Hassan. While my mom thinks Layla’s perfect, that’s what Mrs. Hassan thought about me. Layla and I used to joke that we should switch mothers; that they’d both be happier if they had the other’s kid.
I don’t want Mrs. Hassan to know all I’ve said and done to Layla because I don’t think I can handle her hating me too. Will she still call me Pinky when she sees me? My dad doesn’t even know the whole story.
I told her not to tell your mom about any of it.
But when I was upset I kind of also blurted out that you’d been missing a lot of school and she got really concerned.
You know how my mom is.
I think she was just calling Ms. Naomi to make sure you were okay.
I feel a little solace from this bit of information. That even after Mrs. Hassan knew the very worst things about me, she was still worried. But I still text Layla again, just to be sure.
You really told her everything?
She doesn’t text back right away, and though she’s less than ten feet from me, I can’t bring myself to look back at her.
Yeah.
I told her.
Now she knows you’re a bitch and not the innocent little good girl you pretend to be.
These are the kinds of things Layla would say to other people before. But these are the things she says to me all the time in this after version of us. It still catches me off-guard.
I throw my phone into my bag and onto the floor just to put some distance between my heart and Layla’s words. Mr. Yoon looks over at me, and so does about half the class. Layla and Sloane are probably smirking, but I don’t turn around to see.
“You okay over there, Miss Baker?” he says.
I want to cover my face and shout NO because I am so angry.
But I just stare at my desk, clench my teeth, and nod.
THE HOT SEAT, PART I
“Seriously, Novak?” I say as I step into my AP lit class. I toss my Macbeth paper onto her desk, a day early, and it slides into place next to a pile of other collected assignments.
“Um, hi?” she says. Ms. Novak sucks in her upper lip and clasps her small hands together before tucking them under her chin, and my brown eyes land on her gray ones with a challenge. Her willowy frame is always draped in long, flowy things, and today she’s wearing a dress the color of chimney smoke that brings out the lightest parts of her eyes. I want to strangle her with the scarf she’s wearing.
“What’s up with you assigning me to tutor someone when I’m not even a part of the tutoring program anymore?”
She nods and pats the butterfly chair beside her desk—Novak’s Hot Seat, we all call it, though we are rarely in trouble if she invites us to sit with her.
“Come. Sit,” she says calmly.
I yank out the single earbud still tucked into the curve of my ear, and the Etta James song that accompanied me to class fades to silence just as more students begin filing in. “I got a pretty crappy message from the attendance office on Friday,” she says once I’m seated.
I deflate, all my bravado gone at the mention of the attendance office. I see where this is going. I tilt my head skyward, resting my neck against the back of the chair, and look up at the ceiling. I sigh, but I don’t say a word.
Dom walks in. He reaches out and tugs one of my dangling braids as he passes me, and his hand smells like almond soap and something else, something smoky and rich. When he takes his seat in the front row, I turn my head to look at him. He winks and my face feels as hot as it did in homeroom but for a completely different reason. So I look down at my lap, avoiding his eyes and Ms. Novak’s, and trace the lines of my palm with the fingertips of my other hand.
“So it’s true,” Novak says. She puffs up her cheeks, blows the air out, and the papers on her desk flutter like butterfly wings. It isn’t a question, but I finally lift my head to look at her and nod. She sighs again at my confirmation.
“Damn. Well, to answer your question, I assigned you to tutor Layla to make up for all the work you missed on the days you’ve been skipping, Cleo.” She says the word “skipping” like it’s a word she’s never uttered before, especially not in a sentence so close to my name. Then it’s my turn to be bewildered. I sit up a little straighter.
“But I kept up with everything, didn’t I?” I ask.
“Not exactly. You always did your homework. And that was pretty boss, if I’m honest. But there were in-class responsibilities that I let slide when I thought you were out sick.”
I nod, not wanting to put up a fight, especially after the way I stormed into her classroom. So embarrassing. I just want out of this chair as quickly as possible. “Okay,” I say.
The class is getting rowdy, the way classes sometimes do before the teacher makes herself known. But when I glance at Dom where he’s sitting in the front row, he’s silently reading a book like the perfect human he is.
I turn back to Ms. Novak, an idea blooming. “What if I tutor someone else, though? What about Dom?” And just as I speak his name, the class goes suddenly still and quiet. Those weird silences always seem to happen at the most inopportune times, but the timing of this one is exceptionally bad. Everyone is looking at me. Dom is, too.
“Girl, Dom doesn’t need a tutor,” Ms. Novak says in a hushed tone. She looks from me to him and back again. She tucks a bit of her curly Afro behind her ear. “He’s second in the class, right after you.”
I’m too embarrassed to inquire about this further, to try to figure out why Dom would ask for my help on his Macbeth paper if he didn’t really need it. And before I can say anything else anyway, Ms. Novak says that if I have any other questions I can talk to her about it after school.
“But keep in mind, this is kind of a punishment, Cleo. You did a crappy thing. You don’t get to pick how this goes down when you’re making up for something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”
Just before I head back to my seat, my eyes lock with Dom’s. He smirks, his heavy eyebrows lifting, his white teeth shining, and I die.